by Jim Harrison
That had all been only three weeks before. The dread that pervaded him as he packed his tennis bag was not unfounded. One evening she had spilled hot coffee on her bare breasts and wept. He ran to get some ointment but she waved him away saying that she was not burned, only so sad because there was nowhere to go. He tried to kiss the pink splotch the coffee had made on her white breasts and she became frantic asking him not to touch her. He stood there a half hour as she sat rigidly staring at him. He had never looked upon so profoundly beautiful a body and he finally knelt and kissed her knee and she drew him to her. He told her in a rush that he had it all planned and he would take his savings and they would run away to Seville which was his favorite city on earth and no one would find them there. But she said that if he mentioned it again she would never see him again. She was oddly cold to him when she left that night.
Neither of them knew when they kissed at her car that a “servant” watched leaning against a palm tree a hundred yards away.
The real warning and break in their secrecy came when he happily confessed his affair over drinks with his doubles partner who immediately turned white. His partner was his only friend and confidant in Tucson and a pilot for Aeromexico. And he said you shithead, you fool why do you think Tibey is called Tibey and he didn’t know and was shocked at the reaction and his partner said, “Tibey is for tiburón tiburón tiburón which is shark. Get out of here tomorrow and never come back. That bitch in heat has killed you if you don’t go. You’ll be buried so deep in the desert.” He hit his friend and the friend seemed not to notice pouring them both a huge drink and saying he had connections and could secure a false passport for secrecy and besides could give him money if he needed it.
It was an ugly and frightening evening that seemed benign when he awoke the next day. He mentioned it, though, in passing to Miryea and she laughed her high-trilling laugh and said don’t be silly he won’t kill you he’ll kill me and refused to speak of it again. That was only a few days before. Now after the tournament they would have three full days together because Tibey was in Caracas. The ruse was that she was going to visit her sister who was the wife of a UN diplomat in New York. The chauffeur would take her to the airport after the tournament and he would pick her up there; then off to Douglas, a border town across from Agua Prieta, and they would reach the cabin the next morning.
All went well except the tennis match that dragged unmercifully on a blistering afternoon. He couldn’t see Miryea in the crowd and after winning the first set by the grace of his partner they lost the second 6–2 and got off to a bad start in the third. His partner glowered at him and his legs felt leaden. He yelled at a woman in the crowd who stood up during his serve. Then Miryea came in and she winked shyly at him and he remembered how happy he was supposed to be and finished the third set electrically. When he was showering, Tibey’s chauffeur came into the locker room and blithely handed him an envelope announcing that Señor Tibey wanted to make him a present. After toweling off he opened the envelope and found a one-way first-class ticket to Paris and then Madrid and several thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills, with a note saying I knew you would win days ago my friend. He examined the ticket several times thinking the return might have been left out by mistake. He decided not to mention it to Miryea. Why ruin the weekend? he thought, trying to calm the palpable discomfort he felt deep in his stomach.
On the way to the airport he stopped to pick up Doll and his bag at the apartment. He had a quick glass of wine to try to dispel the butterflies that came in intermittent surges. He laughed at himself, thinking of all those years spent, often at Mach II, twisting and turning high above Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, occasionally peeing in his pants while avoiding a rocket. Or even ejecting over the gulf off Eglin when the electrical fire started consuming the Phantom, or those near misses on night carrier landings. One of his closest friends had eaten it at Boca Chica, near Key West, after surviving a hundred missions over Southeast Asia. He tended to regard civilian life as utterly benign and this new danger alternately nagged and excited him with the adrenal rush that any mammal feels.
Nearing the airport the sky over Tucson looked bloated and filthy with a yellowish-pale cast by rush hour auto exhaust. A tape stuck in the deck and when he pulled it out it unwound like spaghetti all over the seat. Despite the air-conditioning the car stunk of ozone and he longed for the trip through the mountains with Miryea. He had decided to skip the hotel stop and Douglas. They would have dinner in a fine restaurant he knew in Agua Prieta, then make the small cabin near Colonia Marelas by nightfall. Perhaps Tibey had friends in Douglas and the discomfort of traveling farther on was mitigated by the thought of getting caught red-handed in a hotel. His friend, the pilot from Aeromexico, had insisted that Tibey was involved in every form of financial chicanery, legal and illegal, right up to and including the vast border heroin traffic. When he got home on Monday he would call an old friend in Naval Intelligence who could run a check on Tibey for him through Washington. Not that it would have mattered though; he liked Tibey very much and in three months they had gone from being casual acquaintances to something close to friendship. The last three weeks with Miryea had caused him some pain on this count but he was unbearably in love and held on to it as the first totally grand thing in his life in years. In fact he was as lovesick as a high schooler of an especially sensitive sort who wonders if he dare share a poem with his beloved or whether she will laugh at him. He does read her the poem and her feminine capacity for romanticism for a moment approaches his own and they are suffused in a love trance, a state that so ineluctably peels back the senses making them fresh again whatever ages the lovers might be. You see it happening from grade schools to retirement communities: the certainly accidental cohesion of two souls and bodies, often resulting in terror and unhappiness because so much previously unknown energy is released. It had been so long since he had felt anything remotely similar; he had had a half-dozen solid infatuations with women ranging from a Madrid television actress to the recent Texas girl, not counting his marriage which added up more to an affectionate companionship than anything else. She had been a nurse at the base in Guam, a farm girl from Indiana, and they became married almost by the force of nostalgia alone.
At the Braniff entrance he slipped a porter ten bucks to keep an eye on the car and went directly to the V.I.P. lounge where Miryea sat sipping a drink, breathtakingly tailored and cool. He had a Stolichnaya martini and she told him she went so far in her deception as to check a bag through to New York which was full of gift clothes to her sister. The two attracted far more attention than they would have thought possible: he was impeccably tanned and fit, looking a half-dozen years younger than his forty-one if you didn’t look closely around the eyes, dressed casually but expensively with a Rolex on his wrist. And she was the vortex of attention nearly anywhere, especially when the audience was sophisticated, say in Rome or London or Paris. She was born in Mexico City with a Guatemalan-Barcelona background and educated in Lausanne and Paris. She had spent much of her young life (she was twenty-seven) in being cold, neutral and tasteful, under which patina burned a passionate and knowledgeable young woman. She was a little shorter than he was, about five eight, and owned an almost alarming grace so that when she did something so simple as to sit down in the Braniff lounge, light a cigarette and look at a magazine, many eyes were on her. Even now a thickset older man with a calf-bound briefcase watched occasionally from behind the pages of Forbes. He was a lieutenant of Tibey’s out of Mexico City that she did not recognize. When they left he casually followed making a CB call and turning away from them at the first freeway exit ramp.
In the car she was happy and in a girlish mood, rewinding the splayed tape and singing him some Guadalajaran folksongs he liked. Outside the city limits she took her bag from the backseat and changed her formal Balenciaga suit for a light summer dress. He said he couldn’t bear to see her sitting there at seventy miles an hour in her underthings and she said my love no one asked
you to bear it so he drove off a desert two-track-rutted road and they made love in the late afternoon bent over the hood of the car. Some four hundred yards away on a knoll a man watched them with Zeiss-Ikon binoculars. He leaned against an anonymous pickup and sighed to himself as Miryea’s legs raised, fell and clutched at the man. He took a Tres Equis from a cooler on the seat, feeling as feverish as the hot air that wavered and distorted the view through the binoculars.
He thinks to himself that if Tiburón were there he would take the rifle from under the seat and shoot them as one would a deer or mountain goat. Meanwhile he watches them complete their love and her mouth open in laughter that he barely hears. She dances in a circle and the viewer swears as the man slumps to the ground and yells something. He lowers the binoculars a moment and thinks he can’t fault the gringo on his taste and that she is a vision, and he had only seen her once from a distance when Tiburón visited his old mother in Durango for a week.
Back in the car she said she felt like a wonderful whore what with her sweating and her damp hair sticking to her temples. And how grand it was to go for a trip in a car and how it had been years since she had done anything but fly. He had begun to wonder paranoiacally about the pickup a quarter-mile back, thinking he had noticed it before they stopped. But the pickup had turned off in Benson and he left off worrying until they passed through Tombstone and she had shut her eyes thinking it was a terrible name for a town. He remembered making a tombstone when he was ten for his horse who had entangled herself in barbed wire so badly his father had to shoot her. He had painted on a large rock: SUSY BORN IN 1943 DEAD IN 46 HERE LIES A GOOD MORGAN MARE OWNED AND LOVED BY J. COCHRAN WHO MOURNS HER PASSING. He got the last part out of the newspaper in the county seat that printed commemoratives in the personals column.
They were in Douglas by seven, bought some supplies and drove over the border into Agua Prieta where he bought her a purse from a saddlemaker and they had a dinner of shrimp soup and roasted cabrito, a young haunch of goat that the cook dressed with oil and garlic and fresh thyme. He loved Mexico and asked her about Durango, Tibey’s hometown down in the Sierra Madres. She said Durango was hopelessly vulgar, a ranching and mining center that went unmentioned in the tourist books and that was why she liked it so much. Tibey had a ranch there and he had been invited for the shooting in a few months. Miryea said it looked like Montana or parts of Catalonia or Castile and that there were a lot of quail and wild turkey on the ranch where she kept her horses. Tibey had built a clay tennis court and drove her crazy with it to the point that she refused to play, whereupon he had trained several of his henchmen with the help of a tennis pro imported from Mexico City.
They neared the cabin in the last of the twilight, carefully moving up the mountain two-track. Twice he stopped and left the car to remove rocks washed down in flash floods from the arroyos. He wished that he could get a hold of good topographical maps of the area but there were none. In his usual methodical way he already knew more about Mexico and Mexicans than all but a few visiting Americans. He read Wolmack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution and a half-dozen other available texts on recent Mexican history. He was still somewhat of a professional warrior and like the Japanese samurai it was an instinctual part of his code to be mindful, to know and understand as completely as possible where he was and why. He was just as instinctually a non spectator and could not bear to have his immediate energies directed by anyone else. In the service this had made him unpopular with senior officers, and somewhat of a natural hero to everyone else. In the vacuum of his first two years of civilian life he was competent to no particular purpose. Here in Mexico, after only a few visits, he was known and warmly welcomed in a little mountain village cantina. The locals teased him about his Castilian pronunciation, doing elaborately humorous imitations.
When they got to the cabin he could tell immediately that she liked it. Doll went berserk snuffing around her hunting grounds but wary as she was trained of the scorpion and rattlesnake. He unloaded the car and started a fire in the small fireplace in the last light. He unrolled the double sleeping bag on the bed as she stared at the fire, listening to a brief shower beat off the tin roof. The dry wood smelled almost of perfume and she asked him to bring the foam rubber cushion and the sleeping bag to the hearth. He turned the kerosene lamp down low and thought of the morning walk he would take her on to where a small mountain creek made a clear green pool in the rock. They made love slowly and he marveled at the way the flickering light of the fire ran moving shadows up and down her body. They were mildly tipsy and he moved a large log away from the fire as the room seemed dense and overheated. She dozed for a while and he made another drink trying to remember when he felt so full and at the same time so alive and totally released.
Now we must back away from the lovers and let them rest but only for the shortest of moments. Let us perch on the log mantel, an impassive stone-eyed griffon, for it is best to have stone eyes for what we are going to see. The room is turning cool and the lovers hug themselves for warmth, then move, still in sleep, to each other. The light of the lamp is low and the shadow of the fire has become cold and weak. Outside the wind has picked up and hums under the eaves like the keening of a warlock. Doll is restless by the door and growls and whines, then barks frantically as the door bursts open. The room is flame-blue as a shotgun blasts the life from the dog. Three men rush into the cabin, one of them grotesquely huge. They pounce upon the lovers and Cochran howls as the wind is crushed from him and he is caught in a choke-hold by the huge man who is shouting in Spanish. Miryea is caught by her arms and she faints, held tightly by the man we saw watching with the binoculars. Tibey stands back and turns up the oil lamp. He revives the lovers with a pitcher of water from the table. His eyes look even wider apart than usual and his mouth hangs open though he is wordless. The huge man holds Cochran close so that he may watch as Tibey takes a razor from his pocket and deftly cuts an incision across Miryea’s lips, the pimp’s ancient revenge for a wayward girl. Lips may never be sewn back up perfectly especially when there is a long delay, which there will be Tibey nods. It is Cochran’s turn. The big man begins beating on him with long powerful punches, propping him up against the fireplace. Miryea faints again but Tibey, holding her by the ear, forces the lids of her eyes open with his other hand. As Cochran passes out he thinks he sees her ear come off in Tibey’s hand. Tibey groins Cochran with a boot then washes his hands. The smaller man gives Miryea an injection and they are loaded into the trunk of a limousine down the trail. Tibey sits in the limousine breathing deeply, saying out loud to himself that perhaps they are making love in the trunk. The big man and the smaller man busy themselves spreading kerosene throughout the cabin. They back Cochran’s car up against the door. The smaller man throws a match in the cabin and as they walk down the road they are silhouetted by the burning cabin. It is a long drive to Durango and Tibey lays back drinking from a bottle of Scotch as they jounce down the trail toward the road. He sees the explosion of the car dimly in the rearview mirror. About thirty miles down the road, still far from the main highway, they stop and pitch a body into the brush.
CHAPTER
II
The change was akin to dreaming that you were on another planet only vaguely similar to our own, then waking in a state of vertigo to find that you were on that planet. It was as strange as permanent déjà vu, so that what he thought of as his own reality drifted farther away from him every moment, dwindled until only an occasional picture floated from his mind—his daughter, the road in front of an Indiana farm, his bird dog. In the month in the room he had systematically exhumed and exhausted his memory so that when he was finally ready to leave the room he somehow did not recognize the world as the one he left behind. The resemblances simply weren’t strong enough to draw him back and at night when the pictures came he felt no attachment so the pictures hurriedly left. At first he thought the concussion in its severity had scrambled his brains, but he quickly lost interest in medical explanations. The
re was an impenetrable ache that he localized and insulated, and would protect to keep him alive. When the image arose he saw it again through the reddish tinge of the blood that had blurred his eyes, the dog flung across the room and high shrill white screams that still burned against his eardrums and that he could recapture as clearly as putting a record on a phonograph. He only remembered idly how his arm had given way in a sharp crack, the jaw and cheekbone and ribs caving. They were of no interest to him, only the voice of the other he could recreate so that it would eerily sing or whisper to him.
After that long night he let Diller know he was fully conscious in the morning and Diller began with Demerol without frying to draw him out. Diller only asked if there were someone who should be notified, adding that he was out of danger: the arm and the ribs had set okay but one side of his face was a mess and he should seek surgery back home wherever that was. Diller took a small mirror from the wall and showed him the swelling had subsided but the injury drew his eye down until he squinted to compensate. Then the doctor added that a captain of the Federales would be coming by in a few days but he need say nothing, with the concussion he had as an excuse to the law.
Later a young man came into shave him but he refused. He said his name was Antonio and then proceeded to bathe Cochran in an irritatingly familiar way. Antonio said that if he needed cigarettes or anything he would advance him the money and get the cigarettes until money came from the States. Antonio laughed and whirled to the door saying that they never had a patient arrive so strangely nude as if he had been born battered and flayed in the bushes. Cochran decided that Antonio was crazy enough to be appealing. Then he was disturbed because he couldn’t remember if he smoked. “I don’t remember if I smoke,” he said.